Director: Soi Cheang
Notable Cast: Aaron
Kwok, William Feng, Zanilia Zhao, Xiao Shen-Yang, Him Lo, Lin Chi-Ling, Gigi
Leung, Tamia Liu Tao, Kingdom Yuen, Cecilia So, Sire Ma Choi, Pan Bin-Long
For starters, it’s really hard to get excited for another Monkey King/Journey to the West film. The various films and franchises that
have had bigger than life budgets and huge names attached to them to come out
of China recently is starting to wear thin. Granted, the quality of the films
are not necessarily waning, thanks to the clever reinterpretation of the
character with Wu Kong or the
continued fun that is brought to the table with Stephen Chow’s interpretation,
but the saturation of the market doesn’t necessarily spell great things. Still,
these films do some serious box office cash in the Chinese film market. With
the upcoming Chinese New Year, that only means we are getting at least one more
and it happens to be the third film is the box office busting Monkey King franchise. For a bit of
context, this series has left me with a lot of mixed emotions. The first film
was a CGI train wreck that had no idea how to properly use the talents in it,
but the second film took a very different tone and went much darker and used a
borderline horror approach to take a few steps in the right direction. One
could only hope that The Monkey King 3
would continue that uphill sprint and improve on the material that came before
it.
Did The Monkey King 3
accomplish this? Well, that’s a tricky question to answer.